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Brandon Startz

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About Me

Hi! I'm Brandon,
I am a Mixed-Methods Researcher at my core, with multidisciplinary skills spanning user experience, education, game design and software development.
With a solid foundation in HCI and experimental methodologies, I offer a unique, user-focused perspective in both research and development roles.
My hands-on industry experience across various environments is complemented by strong communication skills and a passion for integrating multiple disciplines.


This is a collection of my professional experience and original research.


Research & Data Wrangling

Language Learning Tools

Independent Software Development

What is it?

Several projects I made to help speed up language learning.


Projects include:

  • An immersive reading/listening program, integrating karaoke-style text highlight, Anki Flashcards, and GPT queries
  • Automation of Anki flashcard generation, including audio files
  • A book "Difficulty estimator", analyzing a text against current known vocabulary

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An example of the output

Original Research

What is it?

An exploration of what "Freedom" means in different cultures, via their languages. Includes a brief study with native-speakers.


Tools used:

Python, Sentence Transformers, Spacy, Selenium, Plotly, Dash


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An example of the output

Archive

Employment | Finland

What is it?

Feel & Play is a musical app for mobile that helps children develop emotional intellgence skills


Roles:

Lead developer, data analyst & user researcher


Tools used:

Unity, C#, SQL, Observation studies, Unity Analytics, Surveys


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Masters Thesis Project: Automating Games User Research

Game Design and Development MA | Aalto University, Finland

What is it?

Developed for my masters thesis, this program was designed to improve the user research process at HypeHype. Compared in a study against a manual approach, it was shown to greatly increase the speed of insight-collection, allowing a larger turnover of user tests.

This program uses neural language models to automatically classify, label and highlight areas of interest to the games user researcher.


The flow of the playtesting analysis program
Technology / Team / Time:

Developed using Python and Hugging Face language models, while I was working at HypeHype mobile game company as a Player Analyst.

In brief, remote playtesting usually requires the manual review of tens of hours of footage, and we wanted to expedite that process.

Transcripts were generated from playtest videos, which were then analyzed by a sentence classifier trained with manually labelled data and the classified results (in the form of video timestamps) are then passed to the user researcher, sorted by sentiment and intensity.

Aalto docs

GMTK 2024 Game Jam | Finland

What is it?

Scale or Be Scaled is a competitive split screen game, where players race to see who can balance their scale the fastest.


Roles:

Programmer, project management, designer


Tools used:

Unity, C#, Notion, Kanban


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Game Design and Production MA | Aalto University, Finland

What is it?

A FPS with fluid movement, wall-running and frantic race up a tower against the clock


Roles:

UX researcher, Audio programmer, UI programmer


Tools used:

Moderated playtests, Surveys, Usability testing, Unity, C#, Jira


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Contact

Brandon Startz

CV

Github

brandon.startz@gmail.com

linkedin/brandon-startz-40b277133